I had been in need of a class to read config data into both the PHP-GTK OSInet back-office front end, and the back-office client UI for the Drupal 5.x offload module, and hesitated between various solutions, ranging from roll-our-own to the various frameworks out there and the existing PEAR packages.

To fill the need, he gave the Zend Framework a shot and was quite pleased with the results. He gives the sample XML content he pulled in and parsed and the PHP code he used inside the framework to get the job done.